I posted this on the first session, but I'll repeat it here in case anyone needs it: If anyone else is finding this late (like me!) you may be interested to know that the STM32F4 Discovery Board is available from Farnell Element14 - order code 2355377 (here in the UK current price is £17.23 + VAT).

@Colheckman, thanks for the heads up, not sure why you got the bounce message, email on file is correct. I sent another email to feedback with my contact info and an alternate email address (just in case). Thansk again.

If you need to buy dev. kits, Arrow shows that they have 41 at $28.71 and Digikey now has 871 in stock as well for $33.60.

You can't see them if you follow the link provided for the related ST.com website, but if you go to Digikey .com dirrectly and search for STM32F429I-DISCO, then you can see the dev boards stock available.

Guys.... RS Australia seems to have stock of these boards....I just ordered one. They will be a bit under $40US but I don't know if they will ship internationally. I'm not sure if the link below will work, if not use

I also received a correction email notifying me that I qualified to receive the kit and apologizing for the earlier incorrect notification. Thanks! Looking forward to next week's classes and to going through all the getting started material.

How are you determining the first 1000? By login to the website for the class before the podcast?, The first 1000 commenters in the forum?. The first 1000 connected to the Podcast at the time it started at 12:00 pm eastern time? Which I did in both for both of the first two sessions. So is it reasonable for me to assume I qualify based on the above information?

What if we received NO notification. I registered early, attended both sessions. I had some difficulties with connectivity both days, so I replayed both sessions in full via archive in addition to participation.

Didn't qualify either. Not quite sure how? I signed up for the course less than 10 minutes after I received the original email about it. Then I logged in at close to 8am EST both days of the courses and refreshed ever 30 minutes or so. Figured I'd be in the first 100. So disappointed. Can't find one in stock anywhere. Might have to just listen to the next 3 sessions.

Also, these don't appear to be in stock anywhere. I was going to hedge my bet and buy some.. but Digikey, Farnell/Element 14, Arrow, and others don't seem to have any in stock at the moment.

If you're in EUROPE, RS-Components has some in stock. But they won't ship to the US. I found some similar knock-off kits on eBay and Aliexpress, but nothing quite matching the STM32F429I-DiSCO partlist/layout.

Is there an alternate board that will work for the majority of the topics comming next week? It looks like STM32F429I-DISCO is the only board with an LCD that I could find, how integral is that to the upcoming topics?

Since the topic is bound to be archived, those of us unlucky enough not to win a board can always wait until some become available, and come back to the class (provided it's archived and made available, like the first two are) and pick it up from there, though we'll lose the benifit of the Q&A.

For anyone reviewing this material, Click on the "Session Calendar of each day Dec 11, Dec 12.." that click will take you to the agenda and special advice information for that session such the slides or advance documetation or reading links. Thanks!!! I got it how this online system works.

I WILL ADD: SINCE THIRD SESSION IS IN A WEEK, CAN YOU POST AHAED, SLIDE, LINKS, ANYTHING WE READ AHEAD AND GET REDAY AND PREPARED, PERHAPS EXTEND THE SESSION TO 1.5HR (HANDS ON LAB SOMETIMES REQUIRES TIME (STOP AND WAIT, SO EVERYBODY IS IN SINK).

Hi colheckman, thank you for looking into the profile issue of not reflecting the course attendance.

I hope this won't affect my eligibility for getting the free development board. My notification was posted more than 3 hours ago so I hope that counts. I just looked into my profile and nothing was changed. I am sure you guys are fair about this, and I don't mean to keep bugging you but I saw some other members later accusing the same issue as mine. I am hoping that this gets fixed.

I have attended the first two sessions of this microprocessor course also. My profile doesn't reflect this. It shows "Course Progress - BRINGING INTELLIGENCE INTO INDUSTRIAL SYSTEMS", a course for which I haven't even registered... Can you please help in correcting the issue? Thanks.

FYI, I have same issue as leonet99. Profile does not reflect that I attended both "fundamentals of microcontrollers" lectures. Profile shows me registered for BRINGING INTELLIGENCE INTO INDUSTRIAL SYSTEMS" with empty progress.

I couldn't find any record of my class attendance or any grades for any of the 2 lectures I have viewed anywhere in my profile. I had to view the archived classes becuse my corporate blocks the player.

Anyway, the only thing showing in my "EETU progress" is "BRINGING INTELLIGENCE INTO INDUSTRIAL SYSTEMS" with empty progress. I did not registered for that course; I registered for "Fundamentals of Microcontrollers (MCUs): Hands-On Workshop" which I do see it confirmed in the Curriculum Calendar.

FWIW: You can use ST's MicroXplorer program in Linux if you have java installed. I had to copy the contents of the installer to a directory after installing with wine (or in windows) (db help MicroXplorer.jar plugins templates), then I renamed the db/ip folder to uppercase IP. Then you launch the program with "java -jar /opt/MicroXplorer/MicroXplorer.jar"

The M4 should have sufficient resources to run a light weight OS. I wouldn't consider anything with lots of drivers. Android or light weight Linux should work. I'd consider Free RTOS for non-dynamically loaded applications.

For people in Europe I can recommend rs-online.com as a reliable source of the STM32 boards. They delivered to Czech rep. in two days for a shipping fee of 9 USD. /not connected to them, just a happy customer../ And BTW the board itself is very cool. It boots up with six colourful icons on the LCD (video player-image browser-clock-game-performance benchmark-system info). Reminds one of the older mobile phones. You can control it by touching the display. Nice. Really looking forward to the hands-on part of webinars.

@Paraschiv.Gina Qualified attendees have participated in yesterdays session AND today's session (live or via the archive by 5p ET today) and have US or Canada addresses. IF you qualify, you'll receive an email tomorrow and the board in a few days. If you don't qualify, you can purchase the board from DK

Another feature I like to look for when selecting a controller is pin compatibility in the family so that if feature creep requires moving to a bigger part from the same vendor, the board doesn't need to be re-layed out.

A certain mfg. Jacob mentioned has perhaps hundreds of videos detailing the peripherals in their MCUs. The STM youtube seems to be filled with short promos. Would be so nice to see some videos about how to understand and use the busses, DMA, ADC, LTDC, et.

CooCox Yesterday I posted some links to the CooCox system. If you check their forums someone has done some work so that this kit can be used with their system and the "Standard" EABI ARM cross compiler. The older Discovery Kit now works directly.

I have successfully used IAR, CooCox and EABI compiler under cygwin and MinGw -- lots of choice.

http://www.coocox.org/index.html

So if you do not have the bankroll for IAR -- which is worth every dime -- try the other routes.

Qualified atteendees will receive an email tomorrow (12/4/13) notifying them that a kit is on the way.

Leviton, the nice thing is that the serial debugger interface is built into the development kit so you won't need an external tool. I've had great experiences so far with the IAR I-Jet. and the I-Scope for low power measurement.

Thank you Jacob, EE Times, and ST team. Looking forward to next week's lesson. Do you recommend any good text books for beginners? I'm new to MCUs and I'd like to get a nice book to reference while I am learning.

You can include assembly instructions in the C. If you take a look at the startup files you will notice the startup for the micros is generally done in C before the C environment is copied to RAM and setup!

Thank you. Couple of quick questions. Does there have to be any code rework to move up in the micro family? When checking availability of a part, will any EOL dates be on the site, or will the rep know? Thank you.

We encourage everyone who is participating in the Hands-on sessions next week to download the software and get the Discovery Board up and running in advance of the class. If you run into problems, please contact Jacob or sign into the chat. We will be monitoring (irregularly) during the week!

@ST_Alec: We are trying to capture Digitals and communicate over serial simultaneously. Our communications are async and our digitals are small blips so 180mhz would be a 9x speed boost and might work :)

Is SWD (through st-link on stm32l-discovery) just as capable as a hardware (JTAG) debugger? I use SWD on the STM32L-Discovery and it seems a bit sluggish. I'd like to know if it's worth purchasing a external hardware debugger tool.

All of the STM32 family is single core today. The minimum high end CPU frequency is 32MHz. So most operations can be handled by a single core processor. With dynamic clocking, you have the ability to control power based on CPU frequency including sleep and stop states. Much easier than to synchronize two processors.

@Jacob Beningo - Another suggestion I don't see in your slides is to check for chip errata before making the final choice. There could be few or many, and they may be a major problem, or not affect your project at all.

Welcome back everyone, and to the new folks, please see the note below regarding the audio stream.

The audio player will load automatically when the radio show audio begins. Some corporate networks block the sort of streaming audio content used by this player. Please make sure you have the latest version of Adobe Flash for your Internet browser via Adobe's web site. If the player loads but you are not able to hear the live audio, you may still be able to hear the archived audio after the live program begins by returning to this page. More Troubleshooting